So over the last weekend (27th-29th of May), I attended the London MCM expo to sell my work.
I took with me various A4 prints of my work, business cards, book markers, and shrinkie key rings (Pictures of most of them can be found in my previous posts).
I also had sketch and digital commissions available, although I didn't know if they would be wanted.
Long story short- it was a big disappointment in terms of sales. Despite that, it was a really good experience and I got the chance to meet some fantastic people, and gain some advice.
I realised straight away that my work wasn't selling because I wasn't aiming at the right audience, rather than people not liking my work. Because the London MCM expo is geared up to anime fans, and many people go dressed as their favourite characters, anime is pretty much all that will appeal to them.
So any other artist selling anime like work was much more likely to pull customer's attention. Another factor was how small the comic village was, and how large the merchant part was. People were often spending all of their money on merchandise as they walked through the venue, and then not having any money to spend on art by the time they got to Comic Village.
The one thing that did irritate me a bit where "collectors". These were people who went from table to table not bothering to look at art, but taking business cards for the sake of it. Considering how expensive a pack of 50 were (roughly £16), I was a little disappointed that people were taking advantage of them. Some where also having a look through my portfolio and prints, realising the work was on the business cards, and then taking one of those for free instead.
In the end I resorted to putting them details up in small piles on the table, which helped a bit to control how many people were taking them just for the sake of it.
Because of this I've also come to the conclusion that it would be better to produce business cards that don't have various pieces of my work on them, and just have a simple, eye catching design instead.
In the end, I managed to make about £39 pounds, the majority from sketch commissions. I sold something like 5-6 prints, 2 shrinkie key rings, 4 book markers, and the commissions.
Although it was disappointing money wise, it hasn't put me off the idea at selling at other conventions. The MCM is very heavily anime influenced, and that's just not a market I want to get involved with. There's something I dislike about the idea of forcing myself to draw in another style which isn't true to me as an artist. It's a very alien idea and I don't really understand why other people do it, as I think it's a very limiting and detrimental style to use.
I plan to do some research over the summer and find out if there are any other conventions that are a little more open to different genres and styles, and try again.
I'm also going to try and sell the reminder of my work online by setting up a shop on my website and offering them on DeviantArt (I'm hoping that by selling them for much cheaper than what DA charges then people will be interested).
Another factor I think that was a problem was that I was sharing the table with 2 friends. I think this made the table far too confusing and hectic, and often 2 out of the 3 were over looked once some one had already gone through one folder. So in future, I'd buy a table to myself, and sell only my work on it.
So all in all, a good experience and a huge learning curve. I'm really looking forward to having another go in the future!
